Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, still preacher to the pontifical household, is a prolific author who has written many good pages inspired by patristic and other traditional sources. However, he easily goes off the rails from time to time, as in a Holy Week sermon in St. Peter’s Basilica several years ago when he denounced the Fathers of the Church en masse for their lack of charity to the Jewish people. Another instance is his treatment of communion under both species in The Eucharist: Our Sanctification (Rev. ed., Liturgical Press: Collegeville, 1996).
There are two main scholarly faults he commits regarding this topic on which his enthusiasm for the laity’s communion under the species of wine seems to bias and limit his use of sources. First, and surprisingly for a university professor of early Christianity, he misleads his readers with a truncated version of the famous decree attributed to the late fifth century Pope Gelasius: “They should receive the whole sacrament or be deprived of it altogether. It is, in fact, sacrilegious to divide this mystery which is one and identical”. This is a key point in Cantalamessa’s grand narrative of how all the faithful used to fulfill the command of Jesus to drink his Blood, until the Middle Ages and especially Trent when a number of factors took the cup away from the laity until Vatican II and present legislation most happily restored it. But it turns out that the celebrated quote, known since the 12th century from its appearance in an anonymous addition to the Decretum of Gratian, is not to be found in the place Cantalamessa cites: volume 59, page 14 of the Latin Fathers in the still widely used Migne edition. This is nothing more than the first page of the letters of Pope Gelasius, and there is no reference to reception from the cup. One wonders whether Cantalamessa simply copied a reference from another writer without ever reading the quote himself in context. If he had consulted the article on Eucharistic communion in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, for example, he would have found that just a few decades before Pope Gelasius, Pope Leo the Great had to denounce Manichean type heretics in the liturgical assembly who declined to receive the Blood of Christ, while receiving under the form of bread, as a way of avoiding contamination, in accord with their heresy which found some or all material things to be impure. Biographical sources on Gelasius say that as Pope he was himself still contending with Manicheans in the 490s, and here is where the part of the quote omitted by Cantalamessa is crucial for understanding: “by I know not what superstition”. Thus it is that Catholic writers have explained that Gelasius was only condemning abstention from the cup when the abstainer superstitiously considers its consecrated contents impure and illegitimate. It is such superstition which “divides the sacrament”; the sacrament is not divided as long as at least the priest drinks from the chalice. Furthermore the Decretum Gratiani itself referred the quote to the priest’s obligation to receive from the chalice, not the laity. Since the quote is only a fragment, we can speculate at this point that perhaps the context known to the interpolator (presuming the quote is authentic) was indeed capable of interpretation in this restricted sense: the Pope was condemning heretical priests who abstained from the cup. At any rate, the quote was a weapon in the arsenal of Protestants who maintained that Christ in the sixth chapter of John had commanded everyone indiscriminately to drink from the chalice; they used the Gelasian fragment from the early Church to back up their claim that the medieval Church was disobeying Christ. St. Robert Bellarmine provided a detailed response, and the great Bossuet used the Manichean connection to explain the quote in his masterful apologetic Treatise on communion under both species. The upshot is that the quote from Pope Gelasius has been explained by St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, le grand Bossuet and countless other Catholic writers who have defended the legitimacy of not distributing the species of wine to all when there are good reasons for not doing so, but Fr. Cantalamessa only provides a truncated version of the quote which in reality provides no support for people like him who exaggerate the significance of communion under both species if they do not heretically imply that the laity are obligated to receive from the chalice.
Which brings us to the second of Fr. Cantalamessa’s scholarly errors, which is one of omission: saying that the theological reason for not giving the chalice to the laity was in order to emphasize Christ’s full presence under both species, over against the Reformers, Cantalamessa fails to consider a different decree of the Council of Trent where it is solemnly taught that Christ’s command was never meant to obligate all of the faithful to receive the cup. In other words, the full presence of Christ under both species is not the only matter of belief which is involved with the question of the chalice: it also has to do with the true interpretation of several words of Christ himself about eating his body and drinking his blood. The Reformers claimed the plain sense of these words was the obligation of all to drink from the chalice, with the consequence that the Church was in error by reserving it to the priest. So there is a fundamental issue of faith and the Bible here: the Church’s authoritative discipline and teaching is the true interpretation of the Scriptures, and she has never understood Christ to have given a strict and universal command that everyone must drink from the chalice: it is sufficient as a minimum for the priest to do so, in the person of the apostles, as it were, and in the person of the whole Church whom he represents at the altar, as St. Thomas says.
Despite the greater sign-value of reception under both species from the standpoint of the symbolism of the chalice itself, there is therefore a value present in the Tridentine Mass where the priest alone receives from the chalice: in addition to considerations of hygiene, orderliness and ease of reverent distribution and reception, the Church perpetually implies that she, not the heretics of the sixteenth century, truly understands Christ’s words, even to the extent of knowing that he did not intend to bind everyone to receive from the chalice. And when today we hear or sense that many Catholics labor under the delusion that they do not receive the blood of Christ if they do not drink from a cup, then we have all the more reason to be grateful for the form of the Roman rite codified by St. Pius V.
There are two main scholarly faults he commits regarding this topic on which his enthusiasm for the laity’s communion under the species of wine seems to bias and limit his use of sources. First, and surprisingly for a university professor of early Christianity, he misleads his readers with a truncated version of the famous decree attributed to the late fifth century Pope Gelasius: “They should receive the whole sacrament or be deprived of it altogether. It is, in fact, sacrilegious to divide this mystery which is one and identical”. This is a key point in Cantalamessa’s grand narrative of how all the faithful used to fulfill the command of Jesus to drink his Blood, until the Middle Ages and especially Trent when a number of factors took the cup away from the laity until Vatican II and present legislation most happily restored it. But it turns out that the celebrated quote, known since the 12th century from its appearance in an anonymous addition to the Decretum of Gratian, is not to be found in the place Cantalamessa cites: volume 59, page 14 of the Latin Fathers in the still widely used Migne edition. This is nothing more than the first page of the letters of Pope Gelasius, and there is no reference to reception from the cup. One wonders whether Cantalamessa simply copied a reference from another writer without ever reading the quote himself in context. If he had consulted the article on Eucharistic communion in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, for example, he would have found that just a few decades before Pope Gelasius, Pope Leo the Great had to denounce Manichean type heretics in the liturgical assembly who declined to receive the Blood of Christ, while receiving under the form of bread, as a way of avoiding contamination, in accord with their heresy which found some or all material things to be impure. Biographical sources on Gelasius say that as Pope he was himself still contending with Manicheans in the 490s, and here is where the part of the quote omitted by Cantalamessa is crucial for understanding: “by I know not what superstition”. Thus it is that Catholic writers have explained that Gelasius was only condemning abstention from the cup when the abstainer superstitiously considers its consecrated contents impure and illegitimate. It is such superstition which “divides the sacrament”; the sacrament is not divided as long as at least the priest drinks from the chalice. Furthermore the Decretum Gratiani itself referred the quote to the priest’s obligation to receive from the chalice, not the laity. Since the quote is only a fragment, we can speculate at this point that perhaps the context known to the interpolator (presuming the quote is authentic) was indeed capable of interpretation in this restricted sense: the Pope was condemning heretical priests who abstained from the cup. At any rate, the quote was a weapon in the arsenal of Protestants who maintained that Christ in the sixth chapter of John had commanded everyone indiscriminately to drink from the chalice; they used the Gelasian fragment from the early Church to back up their claim that the medieval Church was disobeying Christ. St. Robert Bellarmine provided a detailed response, and the great Bossuet used the Manichean connection to explain the quote in his masterful apologetic Treatise on communion under both species. The upshot is that the quote from Pope Gelasius has been explained by St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, le grand Bossuet and countless other Catholic writers who have defended the legitimacy of not distributing the species of wine to all when there are good reasons for not doing so, but Fr. Cantalamessa only provides a truncated version of the quote which in reality provides no support for people like him who exaggerate the significance of communion under both species if they do not heretically imply that the laity are obligated to receive from the chalice.
Which brings us to the second of Fr. Cantalamessa’s scholarly errors, which is one of omission: saying that the theological reason for not giving the chalice to the laity was in order to emphasize Christ’s full presence under both species, over against the Reformers, Cantalamessa fails to consider a different decree of the Council of Trent where it is solemnly taught that Christ’s command was never meant to obligate all of the faithful to receive the cup. In other words, the full presence of Christ under both species is not the only matter of belief which is involved with the question of the chalice: it also has to do with the true interpretation of several words of Christ himself about eating his body and drinking his blood. The Reformers claimed the plain sense of these words was the obligation of all to drink from the chalice, with the consequence that the Church was in error by reserving it to the priest. So there is a fundamental issue of faith and the Bible here: the Church’s authoritative discipline and teaching is the true interpretation of the Scriptures, and she has never understood Christ to have given a strict and universal command that everyone must drink from the chalice: it is sufficient as a minimum for the priest to do so, in the person of the apostles, as it were, and in the person of the whole Church whom he represents at the altar, as St. Thomas says.
Despite the greater sign-value of reception under both species from the standpoint of the symbolism of the chalice itself, there is therefore a value present in the Tridentine Mass where the priest alone receives from the chalice: in addition to considerations of hygiene, orderliness and ease of reverent distribution and reception, the Church perpetually implies that she, not the heretics of the sixteenth century, truly understands Christ’s words, even to the extent of knowing that he did not intend to bind everyone to receive from the chalice. And when today we hear or sense that many Catholics labor under the delusion that they do not receive the blood of Christ if they do not drink from a cup, then we have all the more reason to be grateful for the form of the Roman rite codified by St. Pius V.
